


The Punchline

by Hobbit_Riddlebird



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Joker (2019)
Genre: Batjokes - implied only, Gen, Not Canon Compliant, Spoilers, Stand Alone, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2021-01-21 07:36:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21295871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hobbit_Riddlebird/pseuds/Hobbit_Riddlebird
Summary: Batman visits Joker in Arkham."Before Joker there was nothing but a clown," Joker sat up, shoulders hunched. "A clown that met a sad little boy who had forgotten his smile." He placed his fingers in his own mouth and stretched his lips into an obscene smile. "The clown helped the boy to remember."(Inspired by Joker 2019 but not a Batjokes-Joker 2019 fic.)
Relationships: Joker (DCU)/Bruce Wayne
Comments: 6
Kudos: 138





	The Punchline

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is heavily inspired by Joker 2019 with some liberties taken for the sake of story. Therefore it is not canon compliant. But it does contain some spoilers for the movie.
> 
> Just something I wanted to write after seeing Joker for the second time and loving it even more than I did the first time.

"You wanna hear the joke of our first meeting, Batsy?" Joker leaned forward against his restraints and looked up at Batman from across the table.

"Ace Chemicals, Joker. I remember. I was there." Bruce remembered it more times than he should, always wondering if he could have stopped the man in front of him from becoming the monster he had become. If only he had been quicker, if only he could have caught his fall.

"No. No. No." Joker smiled. "That was the first meeting of Batman and Joker. But we go farther back than that, don't we brother?"

Batman felt a chill in his suit. "What do you mean?"

"Before Joker there was nothing but a clown," Joker sat up, shoulders hunched. "A clown that met a sad little boy who had forgotten his smile." He placed his fingers in his own mouth and stretched his lips into an obscene smile. "The clown helped the boy to remember."

Bruce's first instinct was to leave and not come back to Arkham but he had to know how much the Joker knew.

"Are you claiming to be the clown, Joker?" He made himself sound bored, disinterested in the story.

"No. The clown was not Joker. But Joker was the clown." He laughed at his own joke.

"Who was the boy, Joker?" Batman was thankful the audio had already been shut off in the interrogation room.

"Ah, but you know that, don't ya, Batsy? You can still taste the grease paint under the clown's fingernails on your tongue, can't ya?"

Joker could not possibly know that unless… no.

"You're lying," Bruce stated. He had to be.

"Maybe I am," Joker shrugged. "Maybe I am not. Either way it is the truth, isn't it?"

A knock sounded on the door.

"Your five minutes are up, Batman," Gordon called out.

"His name," Batman grabbed Joker's arm. "The clown, what was his name?"

"We are brothers of blood, you and I, Batsy, we were both reborn on the same night. Gotham birthed us in fire and blood."

* * *

Bruce booted up the computer, he wasn't sure what he was looking for but he hoped he would know when he found it.

_The clown reached through the gates and stuck his dirty fingers in young Bruce's mouth, forcing his mouth into a mockery of a smile. In the dream he could not move away, he remained frozen until Alfred found him and pulled him to safety._

He had first had the nightmare after the Ace Chemicals incident but there had been a familiarity to the dream even then. But Joker had planted the seeds of doubt, what if the nightmare had been a repressed memory all along, he wondered.

Or perhaps Joker had planted the nightmare in his mind for his own purposes, with the Joker all things were possible. Bruce intended to dig for the truth, something he should have done at the first.

Nineteen-Eighty-one, the year of the Clown Protest, the year his parents were shot in front of him. He started a search of all arrests made that night.

_Joe Chill. Low-level criminal, in and out of Black Gate for armed robbery. Life in prison for the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne. The man in the mugshot was in every way ordinary, unremarkable in every sense of the word. But his actions had changed Bruce's life in a single night. And by association all of Gotham._

But he was not the one Bruce sought. Face after face, clown after clown, he finally found the one he searched.

_Arthur Fleck aka Happy. Arrested in the murder of the on-air shooting death of the popular late-night host Murray Franklin. The murder had made Gotham quite infamous among a certain type of individuals for some time but had been mostly forgotten after the likes of Joker and Riddler. The reports stated that Fleck died while in custody but the manner of his death was unclear._

The face in the mugshot had been wiped clean of the clown make-up he had been wearing on the show but traces remained around his eyes, mouth, and nose. His face was kind, almost gentle, not like Joker at all. But there was something about the set of the mouth that Bruce thought might be familiar.

Could it be, he questioned. Had the Joker's identity been staring them in the face this whole time?

Bruce found the file with the live shooting of Murray Franklin, he clicked play. He had watched it once before years before looking for clues in his parents deaths but had found no answers in the brutal shooting.

He watched Arthur Fleck come out in his clown make-up. Bruce wondered how they had not known the would-be comedian was planning something. And there was certainly something Joker-like in the way that Arthur danced to his seat. Or maybe it only seemed that way because he was looking for it.

_'Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?'_

Bruce listened to the man's monologue, for that was what it was, not listening to what he was saying but how he spoke, the words he used, his accent and pronunciation, his movements as he talked, much as he had studied the Joker throughout the years.

He watched without emotion as Arthur pulled the gun out and shot the late-night host at point blank. The footage was warped with age but still brutal and shocking in its suddeness. But the way Arthur held himself reminded Bruce very little of the Joker he knew. There- something in the way his wrist was bent when the gun went off. He rewound the footage and slowed the speed.

Bruce paused in the exact moment Arthur pulled the trigger.

Had Joker been telling the truth?

"Master Bruce?" Alfred entered the Batcave. "Did the Joker divulge any information regarding Penguin and Riddler's most recent partnership?"

"He told me our fine-feathered friend and his partner are preparing to take their relationship to the next level," Bruce turned to Alfred and almost smiled. "Matrimony."

"By the Queen's Grace," Alfred sighed. "I suppose it will be expected that we send the happy newlyweds a tea set. Should I have the card signed Bruce Wayne or Batman?"

"I do not expect much trouble," he shrugged. "This seems to be a straight deal, so to speak of course." Joker had hinted at a tax deal regarding Cobblepot's enterprise but honestly Bruce knew that was only the excuse the Penguin and Riddler needed.

"Naturally," Alfred responded dryly. "If you do not anticipate trouble from the Cobblepot-Nygma side what else did Joker have to say? You have been in an odd mood ever since your return, if I might be so bold to say."

He should have known he could hide nothing from Alfred.

"Joker did mention something of interest," Bruce stopped the recording and brought the mugshot back up. "Arthur Fleck, what do you remember of him?"

"Only what I heard on the evening news," Alfred looked at the screen. "A sick man that wanted attention. Not unlike some of the rogues Batman faces today, I suppose."

'You there, stay away from the boy.' Sometimes Alfred, a younger more frightening Alfred, was in his dream.

"How old was he? The night of the riots?"

"I imagine you could his age in one of his reports," he looked to Bruce suspiciously. "But to answer your question, he was thirty-six."

Thirty-six, Bruce thought. Too old to be his Joker. He was not sure if what he was feeling was relief or disappointment, perhaps it was neither. But there was still the question of the dream.

"Did Arthur Fleck ever visit the manor, Alfred?"

"Whatever do you mean, Master Bruce?"

"It's just a memory... A dream... A memory of a dream," Bruce knew he wasn't making much sense. "He was here wasn't he?" He wasn't sure of it but the look on Alfred's face told him the truth.

"Once," Alfred admitted. "You were playing in the tree house and I was in the manor settling a disturbance with the kitchen staff. Fleck got through the front gate, it was found out later that he had pretended to be delivery man and the guard let him in. He did not make it through the manor gate but he got closer than he should have. I failed your father and I failed you."

"What had he come for?" Bruce felt... fear.

"I don't see how this has anything to do with what Joker could have possibly told you," Alfred stalled. "It is in the past, let it remain there."

"Do not lie to me, you know Alfred."

"He said he wished to speak to your father."

"My father?" It was not the answer he had expected. "Why did he want to speak to my father?"

"Who can know the mind of one such as he," Alfred shrugged but looked away from both the monitor and Bruce. " If you would excuse me, sir, I have supper in the oven, roast beef one of your favorites."

Bruce felt guilty but he couldn't drop it. "You spoke with him, what did he say, exactly."

"It was more than fifteen years ago, my memory is not what it once was."

"As much as you remember then," he urged. "If there is some connection to Fleck and Joker, I must understand it."

"Arthur Fleck's mother, Penny, had been in your father's employ as a maid in her youth," Alfred spoke carefully. "A pretty young girl with flights of fantasy. She had been... assaulted by the gardener, I was the one that found them. The gardener was let go and Penny gave birth to a baby boy nine months later. She left before the boy was a year old."

"And the boy was Arthur," Bruce mused. "But what does this have to do with my father?"

"You must understand Penny was a very sick woman, after the assault she became fixated on your father, some may say she loved him, she was obsessed. And it only grew worse after the birth of her baby. In her delusional state she believed her baby to be your father's."

'Brothers of blood,' Joker had said.

"Your father was a good man, he tried to help her, both her and her child but she ran off with a construction worker that came to do work on the gazebo." Alfred paused in the story. "And that was the last we had seen of either of them until Arthur Fleck showed up at the gate thirty-so years later claiming to be your father's son."

"And my half brother," Bruce finished the thought. "Is it possible, could he have been my brother?" This would have been before his father even met his mother, he did not feel it was too disloyal to ask.

"No. I swear on my oath to the Wayne family, your father never touched her." And would your oath include protecting the only Wayne heir from unpleasant truths regarding his father? "Why are you asking such questions about Arthur Fleck of all people?"

"Joker claimed to be Fleck when I visited Arkham today," Bruce confessed. He zoomed in on the mugshot, if what Joker hinted at was true, and if Alfred was covering for his father, this man could be his brother, and in a cruel twist of fate then so was the Joker. "He said we were brothers."

Which also meant Joker knew the Batman's identity something he has suspected for some time.

"That would be quite impossible, Arthur Fleck died in Arkham in nineteen eighty-three more than ten years before Joker's first appearance." Alfred touched Bruce's shoulder. "That would make Joker in his fifties, and a little too old to be running around dressed as a clown, I must say."

"You're right," Bruce pinched his nose. Of course Alfred was right. "Go on up and prepare dinner, I'll close up down here and join you."

"As you say, Master Bruce," Alfred stepped back and climbed the stairs out of the Batcave leaving Bruce alone with his thoughts.

Bruce brought up a photograph of his father, Thomas Wayne, and moved it next to the mugshot of Arthur Fleck. There were some similarity, around the nose and mouth mostly, he thought. But the same could be said of any men of similar build and coloring.

He found a photograph of Penny Fleck with some digging in the Arkham database. It was obvious Arthur resembled his father more than his mother, whomever he had been.

He ran a program that would compare Arthur's features against Thomas Wayne and Penny Fleck and determine the percentage of likelihood that they were his parents. He then set up a separate program to compare Arthur with the Joker.

Bruce got up to join Alfred for dinner.

* * *

Batman tossed the printout in front of Joker.

'Joker = Fleck 42% facial match', it read.

"You lied to me the last time I was here," he remained standing, he wouldn't be staying long. "Whoever you are, you are not Arthur Fleck. Why the lie?"

"Every joke must have a good punchline, and every good punchline holds a kernel of truth or else it is not funny," Joker pushed the paper back towards Batman. "I am the joke but Fleck was the punchline." He threw his head back and giggled.

"I never claimed to be a comedian but doesn't the joke typically precede the punchline?" Batman should have known better than to get a straight answer out of the Joker. "If this was the joke, then what's the punchline?"

"I think you already know the answer to that, don't you, Batsy?" Joker folded his hands together. "What have you got in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?"

Batman left, Joker's laughter was cut off by the door shutting behind him. He pulled out the other printout in his suit.

'Fleck = Wayne/P. Fleck 89% parental match,' it read.

He could still hear Joker's laughter in his mind.

**Author's Note:**

> This is meant to be a standalone only but I may play with this universe again. 
> 
> Thank you for reading.


End file.
